I somehow missed this in my earlier web-dredging, but there’s now a Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts demo available for your downloading pleasure. The WWII RTS beast weighs in at a hormonal 1.92gb, or 137 Peggles. The demo contains the tutorial and the first two levels. And by the way, if you’ve ever played an RTS and not suffered from the experience, then you should play Company Of Heroes. I mean seriously: try it now, it’s one of the better ones.

But yeah, Company of Heroes is a great RTS game. Better in skirmish/multiplayer than the campaign, though, as it’s generally more tactical and the enemy doesn’t just either stand around waiting to be shot or charge you in waves. Each confrontation feels more real as a result.

Yikes! I used to think that 100 Mb demos were too large, but that seems completely reasonable compared with these 2 Gb demos we’re seeing nowadays. If they’re going to make you download multiple gigabytes of data, they might as well make the whole game available for download and let you pay to unlock it.

Company of Heroes does look absolutely awesome, but I haven’t bought it. Given my usual performance with strategy games (EG, my loss last night at a 1v1 skirmish on Homeworld 2, against an Easy CPU opponent), I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much as the rest of you lot.

…One question: does the skirmish mode allow alliances between players and CPU players? ‘Cause I have the room to enjoy these games when I’ve got a CPU ally to take a share of the punishment, so I can concentrate on cooing at the units.

@Fat Zombie: Basically, the Allies and Axis cannot intermingle with each other, so if you’re playing Allies, you can’t have an Axis on your side. But, to directly answer your question: yes, you can have the computer on your side in skirmish, in two v.s. one, two v.s. two, or whatever.